Conventionally, a receiver could have notified a transmitter of only being decodable via a digital interface. In this case, in a case where both the transmitter and the receiver can perform decoding, transmission is performed in such a manner that the transmitter determines which performs decoding or a viewer specifies a device to perform decoding by the viewer's operation. The transmitter cannot know quality of a decoding ability of the receiver, and, also for the viewer, it is extremely difficult to determine which decoding ability is more superior between two devices.
For example, Patent Literature 1 discloses a mixing technology of object-based audio. The object-based audio realizes stereophonic sound by supplying individual object sound sources without mixing the object sound sources and rendering the individual object sound sources on a reproduction device side.
An encoded stream of object-based audio includes encoded data of a plurality of object sound sources. The encoded data of each of the object sound sources is made up of not only sound data but also metadata such as position information on an axis of coordinates. It is considered that the encoded data of each object sound source is caused to have degree-of-priority information indicating a degree of priority at the time of decoding.